US Supreme Court to hear constitutional test of birthright citizenship

If you are born on United States soil, are you automatically a citizen of the country?

This is the question that will be put before the US Supreme Court on Wednesday, a response to President Donald Trump’s extraordinary effort to change longstanding interpretations of the country’s constitution amid his wider hardline immigration drive.
Advocates challenging Trump’s efforts to do away with so-called birthright citizenship – in which any infants born in the US, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, concurrently become US citizens – hope to present what they see as an open-and-shut case to a nine-justice panel of the country’s top court.

“This is one of the biggest issues for American society,” said Aarti Kohli, who will be present at Wednesday’s hearing as executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, one of several groups that brought the challenge.

“It’s not just about what the executive order does, but it’s about the power that the president has to rewrite the Constitution.”

Advocates have not shied from the difficult context of the highly consequential case, which they say risks transforming the cultural fabric of the US, inflating the number of people living in the US not afforded equal rights, and creating a “permanent underclass” for some immigrant groups.

It will be brought before a US Supreme Court dominated by a 6-to-3 conservative supermajority. The panel has recently handed Trump a handful of major defeats, but it has largely leaned in the president’s favour on immigration.
“Every judge in the lower courts, regardless of which party appointed that judge, has ruled in our favour,” Kohli said.

Trump’s executive order and the 14th Amendment
Wednesday’s case before the Supreme Court represents the culmination of a months-long challenge to an executive order signed by Trump just hours after taking office on January 20, 2025.

The order sought to effectively end birthright citizenship, long interpreted as established under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after slavery was officially outlawed in the US.

The amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v Sandford Supreme Court ruling, which maintained that Black slaves born in the US were not US citizens.